There are any number of reasons why election 2008 is
unusual, and one of them has to do with the presence of
circumstances that generally cause governmental power to pass from
one political party to another. We find ourselves facing at least
eight of those circumstances right now:

1). A war in Afghanistan that has gone on since 2001
although conveniently fading from interest because of
2). A war in Iraq that has gone on since 2003;
3). An economy in which more than 700,000 jobs have
been lost since last January;
4). Vast numbers of individuals losing their homes due
to a crisis in lending fueled by allowing people to borrow money
based on no guarantee that that money could be repaid;
5). An increase in the price of fuel and food;
6). A sudden disastrous decline in the stock market
resulting in a massive bailout which will be financed by the
taxpayers;
7). Mounting medical costs coming face-to-face with the
difficulties of obtaining health insurance; and
8). Declining educational achievement that has gone
unaltered by such ill-named programs as “No Child Left Behind” in
which students are tested and tested but nothing else is done to
improve their educational lot in life.

These are the kinds of circumstances that have, historically, caused
people to storm their polling places in order to toss out the
governing party. Indeed, when you consider that added to these
circumstances is the fact that the current President—a
Republican—was the President when the largest terrorist attack in
history within our country took place, and when you consider that
the current President had been warned by the former President—a
Democrat—to be ready for just this kind of occurrence, it does stand
to reason that a few moments of careful thought might lead a voter
to conclude that the best bet this year would be to allow the other
party to take over for a while.

The polls should show this. No amount of mavericking on the part of
a Republican candidate should convince anyone to allow any
Republican near the seat of power for some time to come. The fact
that this election is still up in the air is an absolute curiosity
to me, and because the Democratic candidate is an African-American,
my thoughts have turned to racism as one of the possible reasons why
this election isn’t a rout.

Now, racism usually doesn’t announce itself in someone’s life. It
doesn’t arrive with whistles blowing and fireworks going on around
it. Rather, it’s a subtle thing, there before you know it and often
before you are even old enough to frame a question about it. Here is
how it was introduced in my own life:

When I was about six years old, my mom called me into the kitchen of
our house on Todd Street in Mountain View, California. She asked me
to get on my bicycle and ride to the end of the street because she
had seen a child riding his own bike out there and she wanted me to
track him down. The house at the far end of the street had sold, you
see, and the little boy out riding his bike was African American.
She asked me to ride up there to the corner of Todd Street and
Dennis Lane to try to find out if that little boy was part of a
family who might have moved into the neighborhood.

Although I was only a child, I knew intuitively that my mother
wasn’t seeking this information because she wanted to roll out the
welcome mat or send a plate of cookies up the block. She had never
made a request like that of me before, and this was during the
1950s, when there lingered over many people a fear that can best be
expressed with the phrase “There goes the neighborhood.” People
somehow believed that the arrival of a minority family meant that
their immediate surroundings would quickly turn into a ghetto.

I was an obedient child, so I got on my bike and pedaled up the
street. As it turned out, the little boy in question was not moving
into that house, nor was his family. I didn’t have to ask. He was
nowhere to be found. But what has remained in my mind for more than
fifty years is the memory of my mom asking me to investigate and
what it told me about her that she thought it appropriate to ask me
to do so.

This is how racism is introduced into a child’s life: through a
request like that, through a casual comment, through a gesture,
through a subtle act of contempt, through an overheard conversation.
It is often introduced by people who would not consider themselves
the least bit racist. Indeed, until push comes to shove in their
lives and they must take a position, they probably never even think
about race.

Aside from that moment in the kitchen, race was not a topic of
conversation in our family until I got to Holy Cross High School
when, in my sophomore year, I became acquainted with a group of
African American boys from St. Francis High School, which was down
the road. Then race did become an overt issue for my mom, and this
was unfortunate because it brought into our home a side of her that
I would vastly have preferred not to see. I’m not sure to this day
what my mom was afraid of in connection with my acquaintance with
these boys. They were only part of a group of kids who comprised a
racial blend of native American, Hispanic, Anglo, and African
American that, to my way of thinking then and now, ought to have
made her proud instead of what she was, which was terrified…of
something.

To her credit, she never once used a racial epithet to voice her
displeasure. But voice it she did, and what she wasn’t capable of
seeing at the time was the primary attraction this group had for me:
They were wonderfully fun to be around. Their parties were the best
to go to because everyone danced and no one was condemned to being a
wallflower. Their parties weren’t about getting drunk, getting high,
or getting anything. I will say some serious smooching went on
although, alas, I was never a smoochee. Their parties were merely
about having fun and fun meant dancing and everyone danced. They
were, in short, my introduction to the idea of inclusion, and let me
tell you that was an incredible gift to a rather badly dressed,
spotty-faced girl who had not the slightest hope of being included
in much of anything else.

I was relieved when the issue of race finally came out of the closet
a couple of weeks ago in this Presidential election. It had been the
dead elephant in the middle of the living room for quite some time,
with people talking privately about it but no one willing to drag it
out into the light of day. This is generally what happens with
issues that are inherently unattractive and potentially explosive:
If they are swept under the carpet, the thinking goes, perhaps we
won’t have to deal with them. But the history of race relations in
America demands that the issue be looked at and talked about openly.
If we do not address it now—with the future of the country at
stake—then when, indeed, are we going to address it?

I was a voter in California when Tom Bradley ran for governor. This
was in the early 80s and there are readers of this who likely don’t
know about that election. Tom Bradley was uniquely prepared to be
our governor. He had been a policeman in Los Angeles; he had served
on the LA city council; he had been a successful mayor of Los
Angeles for a good number of years. He was running at the perfect
time for Democrats to take over the reins of the government, and
things were looking very good for him in the polls as the election
day arrived. He lost, however. But the fact that he lost is not
nearly as interesting as the slate of winners in that election:
Every one of them was a Democrat, like Bradley himself. What I mean
to say is that although Bradley the Democrat lost, the other
Democrats representing every other state level office won:
lieutenant governor, secretary of state, treasurer…Need I go on? The
polls had Bradley a sure winner in advance of the election; the exit
polls had him a winner as people left the voting booths. But those
people had lied to pollsters because they could not say what had
driven their votes for Bradley’s opponent that election day: Tom
Bradley was an African American man and his opponent was white.

There are people in America right now who plan to vote in a similar
fashion. They plan to vote for every Democrat on the ballot except
for Barack Obama. They will phrase their reasons in a hundred and
one different ways. At one end will be those who see themselves as
clever intellectuals and they will vote for all the Democrats and
then for John McCain, saying that “the House and the Senate will
keep McCain from doing anything crazy.” At the other end are people
who say things like a man called Dale from South Bend, Washington,
who spoke to Seattle Times reporter Danny Westneat but who,
naturally, would not give his last name. Those people will be
forthright like Dale: “Let me tell you, I was driving and saw that
bumper sticker ‘Veterans for Obama.’ I couldn’t believe it. When was
that nigger ever in the service?”

And there it is. Nigger. There’s the word. Amazing, isn’t it, that
in 2008 it would cross anyone’s mind, let alone come out of his
mouth? And yet there it is.

It’s a nasty word, but I wonder if it’s any nastier than the subtler
terms used to make unnecessary distinctions between people? For
example, how much worse is it for Dale to use the word nigger than
it is for people over their cocktails to confess that they “just
can’t vote for a black man” or remark that they “just can’t see a
black family in the White House”? Aren’t those people the same as
Dale?

Early in the election process, I had the opportunity to talk to one
of my cousins about this issue. It came up because she said to me
that her concern about Barack Obama was that although he is half
white “he thinks of himself as a black man.” This worried her, and
we talked about it. Specifically we talked about the fact that
historically in the United States, people with as little as a single
drop of African blood were considered black, and, as a country we
developed all sorts of fascinating words to describe them: octoroon,
quadroon, mulatto, for example. It can hardly be surprising, then,
that Senator Obama thinks of himself as black since there isn’t
likely to be a single person in America who’s going to think of him
as anything else. I pointed out to my cousin that taking some time
to listen to Senator Obama’s message might reassure her. So that’s
what she did.

She listened right up to, into, and through the Democratic
convention, and what won her over to Barack Obama didn’t turn out to
be Barack Obama at all. It turned out to be his wife. The night
after Michele Obama spoke at the convention, my cousin called me.
She could hardly contain her admiration for Michele Obama and her
enthusiasm for the fact that Michele Obama might become First Lady.
“She’s wonderful,” were her exact words.

For me, watching the Democratic convention was, in so many ways,
like returning to the girl I was in high school, the one who went to
those mixed race parties where everybody danced with everybody else.
The racial mix among the delegates comprised the face of the real
America, the America that my mom was afraid of more than forty years
ago, the America that we have become. The racial mix on the stage
after Senator Obama’s acceptance speech at Mile High Stadium
represented what is possible in this country once people put away
their fear. There they stood: Senator Obama’s great-uncle, a white
World War II veteran in his 80s; the Senator’s sister, half
Malaysian and half white; his African American brother-in-law and
mother-in-law; his own mixed race daughters and Joe Biden’s blonde
granddaughters…Up on that stage, there were Asians,
African-Americans, Anglos, and mixtures of all of the above. And as
the camera panned over the crowd applauding the group, the faces
shown were every color, every race, and every age. For me sitting at
home—older now than my mom was when she spoke her fears about my
friendship with kids from other races, far older than when she asked
her little girl to ride her bike up the street and find out if that
African American boy had moved into the neighborhood—it was a moment
during which I was so very proud of our country and so thrilled to
be alive and able to witness such a coming together of so many
people of such diversity.

Later in the month, then, I watch the Republican National
Convention. I confess that I did not watch all of it because I
became disturbed by the derision with which the Vice Presidential
nominee along with other Republicans spoke about Senator Obama. I
did, however, watch on the night that Senator McCain gave his
acceptance speech and I confess that I watched for one reason only:
I wanted to count the minority faces that I saw in the crowd.

In order to do this, I never took my eyes off the screen. I counted
twenty-nine minority faces. I had to delete three of them, however,
when my husband informed me that one of them was Senator McCain’s
adopted daughter from Bangladesh and I later discovered that two
others were an Asian cabinet member of President Bush’s along with
her husband. That took the total down to twenty-six. Twenty. Six. 20
+ 6.

That sea of white faces is the way some people want to visualize
America. But not only is that sea of white faces not representative
of America now, it is also not representative of America at any time
in its history. The question is, are we finally big enough as a
people to face that fact? The question is, are we ready to embrace
it?

With the country brought to its knees by the policies of a
Republican government, this election should be the most decisive
victory for the Democratic party in the history of our elections.
The fact that it has even been close, the fact that the Republicans
could actually be returned to the White House for another four years
after the last eight does not just fly in the face of every election
in recent history. It also acts as searing testimony to the fears
that still dominate some people’s decisions: fear of change, fear of
the unknown, fear of skin color, fear of things unexperienced or
misunderstood.

You know, over and over again I have wished that my mom were alive
to see the unfolding of this election. But I do not wish it as a way
of proving to her that she was wrong about my friendship with those
kids more than forty years ago. For as time passed, my mom’s view
broadened rather than narrowed. Into our house in Mountain View came
people of other races, gay people, military people, religious
people, agnostics, atheists, writers, musicians, and artists. My mom
learned to laugh more, she learned to lighten up just a bit, and she
even learned to think it was funny when I swore like a sailor at her
dinner table, as was my wont. And were my mother alive today, there
is not a single doubt in my mind that she would be voting for Barack
Obama. She would vote for him not only because Barack Obama is a
Democrat and my mother would rather have been knocked down by a
cement truck than have voted for a Republican, but also because she
would have seen in him youth, promise, intelligence, and the future
she had come to recognize as something she need not ever have
feared.